Badlands News Brief
An Embattled Media, Mysterious Outages & Gay History
The News Cycle is almost impossible to track these days. At least, to do so fully.
That’s where we come in.
In the Badlands News Brief, the Badlands Media team hand pick news items of interest from the previous days to give you an overview of the biggest goings-on relevant to the Truth Community.
Many items feature original (and subjective) commentary. Feel free to follow the corresponding link to see our writers’ Substack accounts and check out their other work.
Now, onto the news from Thursday, February 22 …
CBS faces uproar after seizing investigative journalist’s files
“Anyone who isn’t confused really doesn’t understand the situation.” Those words, from CBS icon Edward R. Murrow, came to mind this week after I spoke with journalists at the network.
There is trouble brewing at Black Rock, the headquarters of CBS, after the firing of Catherine Herridge, an acclaimed investigative reporter. Many of us were shocked after Herridge was included in layoffs this month, but those concerns have increased after CBS officials took the unusual step of seizing her files, computers and records, including information on privileged sources.
The position of CBS has alarmed many, including the union, as an attack on free press principles by one of the nation’s most esteemed press organizations.
I have spoken confidentially with current and former CBS employees who have stated that they could not recall the company ever taking such a step before. One former CBS journalist said that many employees “are confused why [Herridge] was laid off, as one of the correspondents who broke news regularly and did a lot of original reporting.”
That has led to concerns about the source of the pressure. He added that he had never seen a seizure of records from a departing journalist, and that the move had sent a “chilling signal” in the ranks of CBS. — The Hill
Our Take: “There was a moment back in 2009 when Obama denied a Fox News journalist access to the briefing room, and the entire institution of the press revolted. By his second term, journalists were openly critical of the former president’s secrecy and treatment of the press.
‘This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered,’ said David E. Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times back in 2013.
It appears that, despite the overwhelming transparency of the Trump administration, marked by unprecedented access to the press, we’ve returned to the secrecy of the Obama years. That’s not terribly surprising since, as I mention in my other take today, it’s the same people.
The O’Biden Administration is a puppet of the global corporate communist cabal, which includes CBS. The reason I brought up that moment in 2009 is that I haven’t seen the press get this mad since then. It’s jarring when all the mockingbirds get mad in Obama’s direction. It’s memorable. It’s important: CBS’s alleged confiscation of Catherine Herridge’s personal files is one of the worse violations of freedom of the press in modern history.
As Turley says, this is the kind of overreach that organizations engaging in journalism are expected to fight to the point of imprisonment. Clearly this network isn’t in the journalism business any longer.
This should be the end of the Cabal Broadcasting Service. The unions should sue, journalists should walk off for good, and sources should refuse to collaborate. Posterity should remember their giant eyeball logo in its appropriate context — which, coincidentally, just happens to be one of the network’s most popular shows: Big Brother.” —
AT&T Says Outage Wasn't Cyberattack Despite Widespread Conspiracy Theories Online
AT&T issued a statement Thursday night to explain that the telecom’s widespread network outage earlier in the day wasn’t caused by a cyberattack. Countless conspiracy theories emerged online Thursday morning as people naturally wondered why they’d lost service—theories that will hopefully be put to rest as AT&T investigates the exact cause of the service disruption.
“Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack,” AT&T said in a statement published to its website.
“We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve,” the statement concluded without going into more detail.
Social media was swamped with wild ideas on Thursday about what may have been behind the outage, including an attack by a geopolitical adversary of the U.S. like China or Russia. Alex Jones, America’s most well-known professional conspiracy theorist, insisted during his show on Thursday that there was an 80% chance it was China, and a smaller chance it was the “globalists themselves,” who might be carrying out a “false flag” attack. — Gizmodo
Our Take: “I mean, I'm not suggesting we had something to do with provoking the major cell outage that went viral today across much of the western world ... BUT, I AM saying that
, and I discussed CISA at length in last night's episode of the Devolution Power Hour.In all seriousness, I think outages are some of the most memetic and viral events that catch the interest of the Truth Community, largely emanating from hints dropped in the Q operation, and just based on the deductive reasoning most Anons and researchers employ that posits that the collectivist enemy is probably going to have to attempt some sort of major communications disruption when things really start going against them in earnest.
The central narrative can never seem to come to any firm consensus on what causes these outages, alternating between ‘updates,’ solar events and muh China/Russia, but the fact that the Collective Mind knows there are things to distract us FROM is a net win, to me.” —
"What A Racist Douchenozzle!": Musk Blasts Woke AI Gemini's Product Head As Google Halts Image Generation Over Inaccuracies
Alphabet's Google announced on social media platform X that its artificial intelligence model, "Gemini," would pause the image generation of people. This comes after the woke-tuned model produced countless images of black and Asian people when prompted by the user - but refused to do the same for white people.
"We're already working to address recent issues with Gemini's image generation feature. While we do this, we're going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon," Google wrote on X.
Google continued: "We're aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions."
[…]
"What a racist douchenozzle!" Elon Musk wrote on X, referring to Krawczyk's radical postings on X. — ZeroHedge
Our Take: “I won't be the first to say ‘Garbage in, garbage out,’ in reference to Google's massive and highly entertaining AI fail, but it really should be emphasized.
Generally speaking this is a big struggle in the AI industry, not just because of companies like Google intentionally inputting things like CRT as foundational to the technology's systems, but because even basic AI chat bots relying on decades of mainstream news sources see what's been uplifted as central within our culture and spit out what they're seeing. This bias has been baked into our culture.
For this very reason, I sometimes use AI to steel-man my own arguments by interrogating something like Chat GPT knowing it will give me the kind of refutation our enemy will on the battlefield.
Elon Musk's attempts at producing a non-woke AI are laudable because AI does need to be shown what has been done to warp our culture to reflect the truth of our situation in what it produces.
But we also need to see where all of this intersects—the AI issue, the gender ideology issue, Apple Vision pro zombies... the intersection is transhumanism.
Outsourcing too much of our humanity to AI is a transhumanist issue. Gender ideology is a primer for transhumanist philosophy by promoting the idea that the human body is an obstacle to ‘finding the self.’ Normalizing virtual and augmented reality in our everyday lives based on trends set by a ruling corporatocracy is a transhumanist issue. We are being groomed, intentionally and unintentionally for a transhumanist future.
So while I am amused by Musk calling all of this out, I also see his brain chip endeavors, and his attitude towards the merger of human thought and technology as relatively unchecked in a culture that is already teaching children they can swap out new body parts.
For most people, the moving parts of this are not clear in how they connect. We should not be shocked when they suddenly collide to form a generation of transhumanist kids, and we should be doing what we can now to preserve the values that merge culture and technology with an eye on future generations. I know our enemy's eyes have been generations down the line for centuries.” —
Judge Overseeing Trump’s Georgia Case Donated To Fani Willis Campaign Prior To Appointment
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case against former President Donald Trump, made a small donation of $150 to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ campaign prior to his appointment.
McAfee, who was sworn in on Feb. 1, 2023 after being appointed by Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, made his donation in June 2020 while still working as an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Department of Justice (DOJ), according to financial disclosures. He will soon have to decide whether Willis should be disqualified over allegations that she financially benefited from appointing her romantic partner, Nathan Wade, to work on the Trump case.
McAfee also formerly worked under Fani Willis when she led the complex trial division in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, according to the New York Times.
Atlanta-based criminal defense attorney and legal analyst Philip Holloway told the Daily Caller News Foundation McAfee’s donation was “nominal,” but said it should still have been disclosed to the defendants so they could determine “whether they believed that amounted to a conflict of interest on the part of the judge.” — The Daily Caller
Our Take: “On the one hand, the donation was only $150, and it was made 3-4 years ago. On the other, Judge McAfee failed to disclose it.
The Fani Willis RICO case is such an abundance of disclosure, it’s hard to believe it’s taking place on camera.
The most urgent matter pending before the court is the fate of Fani. Will she be allowed to continue prosecuting President Trump, or will the all-cash-all-luxury-but-totally-legit relationship between her and Mr. Wade disqualify them both? It’s a question of impropriety and conflicts of interest, and Judge McAfee is expected to rule as early as next week on this specific matter.
First, the fact that it is now being reported that the Judge himself failed to disclose a donation to the Prosecutor, despite its age or amount, is concerning. Even the appearance of impropriety can materially harm the public trust. This case is lousy with the appearance of impropriety, and the case itself is unprecedented: A novel legal persecution of a former president and current leading candidate.
After Kaplan and Engoron’s abuses of discretion resulted in outcome-determinative, material prejudice against Donald Trump, this case should be finished — that is, if the public is to be expected to place any trust in the legal system going forward.
Going a bit deeper, Judge McAfee has been fair and allowed both sides latitude in recent proceedings. He allowed Harrison Floyd to explore evidence previously blocked in other courts. He allowed Fani Willis to go on and on while on the stand. The last move was latitude for Fani, but it only hurt her claims that she is not, as it seems, corrupt. He’s looking Mr. Bradley’s text messages in camera. Judge McAfee’s treatment of this case, though we don’t yet know his ruling of Wade and Willis, has stirred a bit of hope in me that there may be still be a thing called justice. It’s a very little bit, but I can’t deny that it’s there.
Considering all that, is it strange that the first judge that seems fair is now facing character assassination? Who does that help?
Finally, Fani’s Must-See-TV hearing last week was instructive for me yesterday, in a totally unrelated story. Kyle posted another user’s thread on the Smirnov indictment, and it is threads within threads. About 30 mins in, I found myself reading about some corruption allegations against Ukrainian public officials. The specific investigations at that part of the story were into behavior that was much clearer and easier to recognize thanks to Ms. Willis: Trips and gifts and large cash payments.
In other words, having watched Fani’s hearing helped me understand a much more complicated — and arguably more important to the public interest — corruption investigation because the behavior of corrupt people is, at its core, very similar.
Now consider that the Ukrainian oligarch exposures in that thread are proving, definitively, that the Biden Crime Family is a side show to the Obama Crime Administration — the same people running the Biden Administration now.
And Nathan Wade invoiced the White House.
It’s probably nothing. ‘Let’s see what happens.’” —
Greece Protests Netflix's Portrayal Of Alexander The Great As Gay
Greek Cultural Minister Lina Mendoni is outraged by U.S. streaming service Netflix’s take on Alexander the Great with its new show “The Making of a God.” The Greek minister of culture is upset that Alexander the Great — one of the most prominent figures in ancient history — is portrayed as homosexual, along with his main friend in the show.
An opinion piece in the Greek daily Eleftheros Typos had already been published earlier, saying that this was a “distortion of the truth.” In the article, Oliver Stone’s 2004 film Alexander was blamed for “launching a propaganda campaign about Alexander the Great’s homosexuality.”
Dimitris Natsios, the president of the right-wing Niki party, called the series “deplorable, unacceptable and unhistorical” and said the film aims to subliminally convey the idea — without any basis — that homosexuality was acceptable in ancient times.
Natsis also asked Mendoni what he thought about all this. The culture minister said the series is full of historical inaccuracies, which “shows the negligence of the director and the lack of quality of the script.”
“There is no mention in the sources that this friendship goes beyond the boundaries of friendship as defined by Aristotle,” said Mendoni.
Asked by Nathosios whether the Greek government would take action against Netflix over this, Mendoni said that “such a move would be unconstitutional. Greece’s constitution has protected artistic freedom since the early 19th century.” — ReMix News
Our Take: “I think it’s important to go beyond just referring to communism and Marxism and get clear that we are dealing with communist warfare, with Neo-Marxist warfare.
This context helps because we can then use the lens of warfare ie. strategic objectives, operations to achieve those objectives and the tactics that make up those operations.
There is a primary strategic objective coming from our Neo-Marxist enemies to ‘Queer History.’ This Netflix series is a good example of an operation tied to this objective.
Neo-Marxist warfare tends to focus on establishing what they call ‘counter-hegemonies,’ which target a cultural power structure that seems to have a white, heteronormative, cisnormative patriarchal figure or influence at the top and then invert that power structure.
DEI and ESG scores are basically massive Neo-Marxist counter-hegemony operations.
Tactically, these ‘Queer history’ operations target one cultural figure and use them to create a new historical narrative. They did the same thing with Joan of Arc a few years ago, claiming she was trans.
Call it all out as Neo-Marxist warfare, not just political differences. Those who don’t understand they are facilitating warfare have been ideologically subverted to participate, but it’s still warfare!
Bring the war itself into the Overton window.” —
BONUS ITEMS
Vice Media to Stop Publishing on Vice.com, Plans to Cut Hundreds of Jobs
Vice Media said it would stop publishing content on its flagship website and plans to cut hundreds of jobs, following a failed effort by owner Fortress Investment Group to sell the embattled digital publisher and its brands.
The moves were laid out in an internal memo from Chief Executive Bruce Dixon, a copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
“It is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously,” Dixon told employees in the memo. He said the company could partner with established media companies to distribute its content. “As part of this shift, we will no longer publish content on vice.com.”
Dixon said Refinery29, the company’s women’s lifestyle-focused site, would continue to operate as a stand-alone publishing business. He said the company is in advanced discussions to sell Refinery29, as the Journal previously reported. “We expect to announce more on that in the coming weeks,” he wrote.
“With this strategic shift comes the need to realign our resources and streamline our overall operations at Vice,” Dixon wrote. “Regrettably, this means that we will be reducing our workforce, eliminating several hundred positions.” Employees who will be affected will be notified about next steps early next week.
The fresh round of staff cuts is part of a plan to make the company profitable since new owners took control of Vice last June. — The Wall Street Journal
Lara Trump Vows Largest-Ever Legal 'Ballot Harvesting' Operation If Elected RNC Co-Chair
Lara Trump says efforts of “historic” proportions are needed to ensure that Republicans, including her father-in-law, former President Donald Trump, win the Nov. 5 election.
Ms. Trump says she is ready to take on that challenge if she becomes co-chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), as President Trump has recommended.
In an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times before a Feb. 21 campaign stop, Ms. Trump declared: “We need to have the biggest legal ballot harvesting operation this country has ever seen.”
Ballot harvesting, which is legal in many states, allows people to deliver other voters’ absentee or mail-in ballots to election officials. Some fear this practice facilitates election fraud. Republicans have long frowned upon it; Democrats have taken advantage of it. “Whether or not they [Democrats] do it legally, that’s up for discussion,” Ms. Trump said.
In any case, Ms. Trump says it’s time for Republicans to start “attacking the game differently.”
Ms. Trump’s remarks to The Epoch Times, and later, to supporters, provided new insights about her vision for a revamped and reinvigorated RNC.
“It feels, for a long time, like the Democrats have been playing chess and we’ve been playing checkers,” she said. Her goal is for the Republican Party “to be the opposite, to be steps ahead of them, and on our toes, and ahead of the game, and facing forward the whole time.” — The Epoch Times
Zelensky Opens Ukraine's National Guard To Foreigners Amid Severe Manpower Crisis
Ukraine's devastating troop losses are long past crisis levels, and its forces are in retreat along some key front line areas, particularly in the region outside Avdiivka in Donetsk after Russia captured the city Saturday. The New York Times observed of the aftermath, "Without dominant hills, larger rivers or extensive fortifications of the kind it built around Avdiivka over the better part of a decade, Ukraine will probably have to cede more ground to hold back Russian units."
"They don’t have a well-established secondary line to pull back to," one analyst was cited in the Times as saying. Ukraine's leadership has long been mulling a new mass mobilization and conscription drive, which has received immense pushback from the war-wearied population. But instead of implementing that controversial measure domestically, President Zelensky is going a different route. He on Wednesday signed a decree opening up Ukraine's military forces to "foreigners and stateless persons."
They can now volunteer to serve in Ukraine's National Guard, per the new order, and may sign a contract at the private, sergeant, or officer levels depending on their qualifications.
Ukrainian media reports say, "To join the National Guard, foreign citizens need to apply to the territorial center for recruitment and social support (TSC) at their place of residence or directly to the military unit in which they want to serve." Foreigners can join for an initial three-year period, with higher ranks possibly being committed for up to five years.
What's more is that "Foreign women can also be recruited for military service if there are vacant female military positions," according to the reports. — ZeroHedge
We hope you enjoyed this brief look back at the major news items you might have missed in this ever-escalating and ever-accelerating news cycle as the Information War continues to rage on around us.
As always, if you have any thoughts on these news items or the MANY others swirling in the digital ether, drop into the comments below to share them with your fellow Badlanders.
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Grooming us for transhumanism is brilliant! I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that these inbred elites are literally loony enough to think they can create human cattle where they can use us however suits them. And it starts with the medical system removing body parts. They inject us with cancer and then gut us like fish as treatment, it's evil!
Regarding CBS, this isn't the first time they have been involved in a scandal. People might have forgotten about Sharyl Attkisson and her job at CBS where her work computer was hacked.
From Wikipedia: "In May 2013, while still employed by CBS, Attkisson alleged that her personal and work computers had been "compromised" for more than two years. CBS News stated that it had investigated her work computer and found evidence of multiple unauthorized accesses by a third party in late 2012. The U.S. Department of Justice denied any involvement. [article continues on]
Prior to all of this, Attkisson was a multi award winning star investigative journalist for CBS. Until she started questioning the narrative.
Wikipedia: In 2008, when Hillary Clinton said she dodged sniper fire in Bosnia, Attkisson contradicted her. Attkisson was on the trip with her and refuted Clinton's account; the trip to Bosnia was risky, Attkisson said, but there were no bullets to dodge. The Washington Post also expressed skepticism and reported that there were no 'documented security threats' included in a review of 100 news articles from the time. The day after Attkisson's report on the CBS Evening News, Clinton admitted there was no sniper fire and said she "misspoke"."
"Attkisson resigned from CBS News on in 2014, after 21 years with the network. She later wrote the book Stonewalled, in which she alleged that CBS News failed to give sufficient coverage of Barack Obama controversies, such as the 2012 Benghazi attack."
"On March 10, 2014, Attkisson resigned from CBS News in what she stated was an "amicable" parting. Politico reported that according to sources within CBS there had been tensions leading to "months of hard-fought negotiations" – that Attkisson had been frustrated over what she perceived to be the network's liberal bias and lack of dedication to investigative reporting, as well as issues she had with the network’s corporate partners, while some colleagues within the network saw her reporting as agenda-driven and doubted her impartiality. Erik Wemple, in his Washington Post blog, said CBS News had greater resources to deal with potential litigation than Attkisson as an individual and commented "if her nearly aired stories are as bulletproof as she suggests, where’s the risk?" He quoted Sonya McNair, a spokesman for CBS News, who had told him the operation "maintains the highest journalistic standards in what it chooses to put on the air. Those standards are applied without fear or favor."
CBS needs to be put out to pasture.